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“Putting Our Hearts Into It” CHAPTER 2. “PUTTING OUR HEARTS INTO IT” Gaming’s Many Social Justice Warriors and the Quest for Accessible Games BY LISA NAKAMURA Griefing, the purposeful use of digital affordances to destroy another user’s pleasure or freedom of movement, is a perennial practice, and women, people of color, and sexual minorities are targeted more than others (Gray, 2012; Nakamura, 2009, 2011, and 2012). This is true of the Internet, in general. Citing a recent study, Hudson writes, In a 2013 Pew Research survey, 23 percent of people ages 18 to 29 reported being stalked or harassed online; advocacy groups report that around 70 percent of the cases they deal with involve female victims, and one study of online gaming found players with female voices received three times as many negative responses as men. (2014) GamerGate, the coordinated social media harassment of female developers and social justice game developers like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, as well as feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian is part of a much longer history of sexual harassment of women in gaming. Its eruption into the news in 2014 only made this glaringly visible to the non-gamer world. Death threats, along with other abusive and misogynistic comments coordinated by users who gathered on Twitter and other social media using the #GamerGate hashtag effectively griefed these women in their personal and public lives, making it impossible for them to continue to work and even to move freely. These GamerGate targets and their defenders on social media were derisively labeled “social justice warriors,” or “SJW’s” because they publicly claimed the identity of “feminist” and asserted the need for more diverse games and game cultures. Men who entered the discussion to criticize misogynistic behavior in the gaming community were called “white knights” rather than SJWs, and were similarly dismissed as either “too sensitive” or “brainwashed” by the feminist movement. DIVERSIFYING BARBIE AND MORTAL KOMBAT 35 This war over the meanings of gaming culture became a war of words and a war over words. This essay examines the complex identity of the “social justice warrior,” and explores how game designers can avoid the stigma connected to the term while pursuing a social justice agenda. I conclude by examining the work of two independent game designers, Jenova Chen and Anna Anthropy, whose game designs illustrate this strategy1. Figure 2.1. Screen capture of Urban Dictionary’s definition of “social justice warrior.” The term “social justice warrior,” now popularized in part by GamerGate, was previously used in the mid-2000s by Tumblr and Live Journal bloggers to refer to the struggle against forms of body-based social discrimination such as sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, and classism. Yet the term has a much longer history with strong connections to religious practice. The term “social justice” dates back to 1840, when Luigi Taparelli, an Italian Catholic scholar, coined it (Ziegler, 2013). “Social justice” activism online is fundamentally a product of contemporary feminist media theory that evolved in reaction to one of second-wave feminism’s greatest weaknesses: its lack of intersectionality with other identities. Since at least the mid- eighties the U.S. feminist movement has suffered from its lack of relevance to and attention paid towards women of color. As woman of color theorists Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa document in great detail, non-white women were not only excluded by the movement, they were pressed into service as de facto educators for 36 white feminists—serving as a “bridge” to span the racial divide (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1984). Thus, social justice feminist practice online is a departure from earlier feminist identities because it encompasses a very wide set of concerns and forms of discrimination. “Social justice” feminists are a vocal and diverse group who are often stereotyped and dismissed as “PC,” or “politically correct.” This has led those who identify with the movement to come under attack as being too sensitive to forms of bias that do not directly concern them. This very willingness to consider race and sexuality, in conjunction with, rather than apart from, sexism has given the movement power and legitimacy among many feminists, particularly younger ones. It has addressed some of feminism’s earlier myopia. Others reject it, since it is so often used within mainstream gaming culture as an insult. This push for additonal inclusivity becomes yet another way to grief other users in public digital spaces through comment sections and discussion boards. According to “Know Your Meme,” a widely used online resource that traces the genesis of popular Internet-native images and concepts, “social justice blogging” is a legitimate and respected part of online activism; however, the term “social justice warrior” is fundamentally pejorative. The site (n.d.) explains that the “stereotype of a social justice warrior is distinguished by the use of overzealous and self-righteous rhetorics, as well as appealing to emotions over logic.” This definition of social justice as an overly “emotional” and irrational social movement sheds light on the dangers and rewards facing feminist, anti-racist, and anti-homophobic gamers. It also explains why some female gamers and game producers who may or may not identify as feminists distance themselves from the term “social justic warrior”. Undeniably, the widespread public condemnation of GamerGate resulted in some material gains for feminist gamers. One example is Intel’s decision to pledge $300 million dollars toward improving diversity in the technology industry, funding a professional women’s gaming team in partnership with the International Game Developers’ Association (Wingfield, 2015). Yet despite these broad calls for reforms, on a smaller scale, the use of the SJW term is still prized among many griefers as a sure way to stigmatize and dismiss a range of feminist and anti-racist critiques and attempted engagements. Yet these critique and engagements have found their way into gaming culture via independent designers of color and transgender activists. Journey, by Jenova Chen of a Chinese-American game maker That Game Company, and Dys4ia, among other games, by Anna Anthropy, a transgender game designer, decenter straight white men DIVERSIFYING BARBIE AND MORTAL KOMBAT 37 as players and as objects of representation within their games. These independent games by women and designers of color use the medium itself to create spaces for social justice discourse that exceed the boundaries of the game, stretching their design and content to encompass radical new, intersectional identities and new play mechanics. Anthropy produces work that addresses transphobia and the experience of sexual minorities overtly, and thus she connects with the social justice movement. Chen’s Journey is almost never discussed in terms of racism, sexism, or homophobia precisely because it avoid overt reference to these identities, though its design is entirely informed by a social justice agenda. Luckily for game scholars, both Chen and Anthropy are also eloquent writers who are entirely forthcoming about their intentions as game designers. Anthropy’s book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop- Outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form (2012) is full of insight about the need for marginalized groups to reclaim gaming as a vital cultural medium. Chen has not produced a similar manifesto about the ways that games can redress misogyny, transphobia, and other forms of inequality in gaming, but he has given interviews (Smith, 2012) in which he has been quite clear about how game mechanics and avatar design can engineer social relations that are radically collaborative, curbing racist and sexist attitudes, and entirely in line with social justice goals. Though Chen and Anthropy’s games address different audiences, reside on different platforms, and simply look very different, they exemplify the unacknowledged and uncoordinated growth of intersectional anti- racist and ableist feminist theory. Such games are redefining a wider gaming culture that is slowly and painfully evolving past the medium’s continued struggle with incivility and hate speech. As many researchers have argued, the majority of representations of non-white and non-male characters in video game fit familiar racial and gender stereotypes (Everett & Watkins, 2008); accordingly, women and minorities often choose white, male avatars in order to avoid harassment (Kennedy, 2007; Yee, 2005). Scholars and gamers have been pointing this out for years, and have usually been ignored, but GamerGate caused this stalemate to flare into overt conflict. The gaming world’s hostility towards its critics from within and outside the world of video game journalism took the form of thousands of angry tweets, posts, and public statements. As gaming scholar Consalvo (2012) wrote years before GamerGate in her essay “Confronting Toxic Gaming Culture: A Challenge to Feminist Game Studies Scholars,” the enthusiastic adoption of video games— particularly casual games—by 38 women players may have led to more sexism within the gaming community rather than less. This claim was proven true when game journalist Leigh Alexander (2014) wrote an essay for the popular gaming blog Gamasutra entitled “‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over.” Readers responded with hundreds of enraged posts blaming feminist players for destroying the culture
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